I was fortunate to have grown up in an area of New York City known as the Kingsbridge section of the West Bronx. Fortunate for many reasons, not the least of which was my love of fishing with which I was smitten at the tender age of twelve. My father spent a lot of his free time taking me for long walks with our dog through the open areas of Riverdale, which was adjacent to our neighborhood and from an economic perspective was the affluent part of the Bronx. Riverdale was bounded on the south by the Harlem River which entered the mighty Hudson at an area called Spuyten Duyvil, and was washed by the Hudson waters on its western shoreline. It was a picturesque area notwithstanding its proximity to Manhattan, and it was here that my introduction to Hudson River stripers began. Although like many kids, my fishing teeth were cut on sunfish, it didn't take long for me to graduate to fishing “The River”, as it was known. A river, which was often times accurately characterized as a dumping site for every imaginable type of human and commercial waste. I can still recall the death of a classmate who, it was claimed, contracted hepatitis after swimming in the river which incidentally, was part of the adventure of growing up in our neighborhood.

Early fishing tackle consisted of a hand-line, sinker and snelled hooks with bits of sandworm for bait. The other end of the line was attached to a heavy piece of wire that had a screw on one end and a bell at the other end. It was screwed into a board and when you got a bite, it rang the bell. A real engineering marvel, I bet would fetch a good price at a fishing tackle flea market today. Sandworms were dug on a flat at low tide and although they weren't the size of the Maine snakes, they did the job. I think worms were sixty cents a dozen then – big bucks for a kid! Our typical catch consisted of tommycod, white perch and ##$$%^ eels. Once in a while we would take the tommycod home to eat. Big mistake! I was never sure if it was my mother's cooking or the fish itself, but I learned catch and release in a big hurry.

One day while digging for sandworms, I noticed an "old-timer" fishing with a ten-foot bamboo rod and conventional reel (another flea market jewel!) What really caught my attention however, was the huge fish he soon landed. Huge of course is a relative term, but when compared to what I was catching this fish was big. In retrospect, it was probably a keeper in today's terminology. Never being one to hide my curiosity I spoke to the gentleman (and that he was), who told me that it was a striped bass and that he was using soft-shell crab for bait (fifty cents apiece then, a lot more today)! In his case, however, he was catching them in a crab trap and sharing his catch with another crabber who would trade the softies for hard crabs. Well, that was the day of my conversion. I graduated from a drop line to a ten-foot bamboo rod, conventional reel, and Pfleuger with a leather thumb guard and nine thread linen. For those of you who grew up on monofilament, that is 27-pound test. Soft-shelled crabs were not “in the cards,” so two sandworms on a long leader would suffice. While I lost a lot of worms to bait stealers, I also started to catch bass! I can still remember the arch in that big rod when a good striper would hit and run. The bass were not big by today’s standards. There was a sixteen-inch limit and my better fish might go to twenty-six or twenty-eight inches with a lot of smaller fish between them. I stayed with conventional gear for quite a while until one day I made another discovery…(to be continued)